Among Scott Pruitt’s odd predilections is dashing around the EPA building to make calls from phones other than his own. This action apparently reflects Pruitt’s concern that—despite his multimillion dollar personal defense force, despite the cone of silence installed in his office, despite multiple sweeps for any kind of listening device—someone might overhear what he is saying. So maybe it’s not surprising that Pruitt also is a little inconsistent when it comes to his email.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has used four separate agency email addresses since taking office, according to Senate Democrats and an EPA official, prompting concerns among agency lawyers that the EPA has not disclosed all the documents it would normally release to the public under federal records requests.
That Pruitt would be hiding documents is also no surprise. Pruitt has not only ordered the EPA to hide formerly public data, and not only slowed down the agency’s response to FOIA requests, but the emails that were obtained in 2017 showed that while Pruitt was serving as the attorney general of Oklahoma, he used his office to turn requests from his campaign funders directly into legal action.
As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Scott Pruitt, now the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, closely coordinated with major oil and gas producers, electric utilities and political groups with ties to the libertarian billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch to roll back environmental regulations, according to over 6,000 pages of emails made public on Wednesday.
Pruitt managed to keep those emails hidden until just after he was sworn in at the EPA. Now that he’s at the EPA, it looks suspiciously as if he kept these pipelines flowing while hiding the connections from Congress. Or in other other words:
But his email ...
Pruitt’s email addresses are not exactly obvious, and not exactly what might be expected if it was a matter of “oh, I forgot I created that one and had to make another.”
Pruitt’s four email addresses include one in the conventional format, pruitt.scott@epa.gov, as well as three others: esp7@epa.gov, adm14pruitt@epa.gov and sooners7@epa.gov, nicknamed after the University of Oklahoma football team.
It’s unclear whether requests made to the EPA for information on Pruitt’s emails, either from the internal Inspector General or FOIA requests, received information from all of these accounts. In fact, it’s not clear that Pruitt is giving out any information on FOIA requests at all.
In November, Pruitt said his staff has focused on eliminating the backlog of records requests filed during the Obama administration over responding to more recent requests.
So under the pretense of dealing with a backlog, the EPA is moving—slowly—through out-of-date requests, while ignoring those specific to Pruitt and his actions. That, and his multi-headed email, makes it difficult to tell whether Pruitt is continuing on with what he has done before.
The emails show that his office corresponded with those companies — including Devon Energy, an Oklahoma oil and gas producer, and American Electric Power, an Ohio-based utility — in efforts to weaken federal environmental regulations, the same rules he will now oversee.
Pruitt’s email was full of not just requests from fossil fuel companies, but many, many thank-you notes for the fine work he had done in promoting their interests. It’s not clear which email address receives those thank-you notes today—or which one is dedicated to lobbyists wanting to offer up their homes.